huangyhg

floor load for "heavy" filing cabinets
dear all,
i hope you can help me with a question on office floor strength. we are moving to a 4th floor office in london, uk.
we will have 6-to-8 "heavy" fire-resistant cabinets bunched together back-to back. each is about 250kg (550 lb) empty, perhaps 300kg full. dimensions 53cm x 68cm (20in x 27in).
the raised floor is intercell, which i gather can take 800kg per sq m easily.
should i have any concerns about the load i am putting on this concrete floor underneath or supports?
a good few people have compared this to 3 large people in a huddle - so hopefully nothing to be concerned about.
out of curiousity - what is the 'maximum' load a normal office floor should take?
thanks in advance & best regards
alex

they will be much more than 300kg full (think solid paper) compactus loads are usually in the realm of 600 to 2000kg and are always greater than the normal office live load.
this is a situation that could be very dangerous and can only be resolved by consulting a structural engineer.
anyway, you computer guys must be doing something wrong - should'nt we have a paperless office by now?

i second csd72.
the weight of the cabinets themselves is negligible. this should definitely be looked at.
i third csd72.
fire resistant cabinets will be close to 400 to 500 kg each when loaded. ( the fire resistant file cabinets themselves are very heavy. ) grouping 6 to 8 of them in a small area is definately something a structural engineer should look at. the localized loading will be way above normal office loading.
hello again & thank you for your replies.
the loaded cabinets are not quite as scary as estimated thankfully! they're about 330kg fully loaded, after test weighing one shelf of tightly filed paper at 20kg multiplied by 4 shelves.
does this alter your thinking at all?
one thought from our builders is to locate the cabinets over a support beam, which i presume would help.
thanks again & welcome any more thoughts.
alex
ps - yes, we're a .com, but keep old fashioned hard copies of our important client info for "doomsday" scenarios! (as well as numerous data backups
i'd still involve a structural engineer. if my metric to lb. conversions are correct, i get about 200 psf, which greatly exceeds any normal office design load.
i've seen some visible creep/deflection issues with a lineup of eight cabinets filled with calculations (bottoms were separate and tops touched) which gave me a healthy respect for these loads. even placing them a beam might overstress it.
there's an excellent chance that running some calculations will give an acceptable answer, but you don't want to find out otherwise.
yes, locating the cabinets over a beam will help. will it help enough????
is it worth the risk to you that its not enough. if you guess that it will be ok, and you are wrong, are you willing to accept the resposibility for your mistake?
still think its best to get a structural engineer involved.
we do these type of evaluations regularly when new tenants move into existing buildings which we designed. they are usually straight forward, and not all that costly unless the floor needs to be strengthened, or a new loading pattern worked out. its fairly cheap insurance so as not to overload a floor.
i think there is more to consider beyond strength. we've designed high density file storage systems for a ll of 250psf and a deflection limit of l/600 to ensure that the tracks work as expected. if they are not on tracks, you may be able to get away with a less stringent deflection limit, but you should still check with the hdfs system manufacturer to see what they need.

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